Google’s 27th birthday: here is the history, the meaning of the name and its owner

Jakarta (ANTARA) – Google celebrates its 27th birthday this year, namely on Saturday, September 27, 2025. Although Google was officially founded on September 4, 1998, since the mid-2000s the company has celebrated its birthday more often on September 27.

The choice of this date is linked to an important moment for Google, namely its success in recording an internal result in the form of indexing the greatest number of web pages at the time.

This giant US technology company has developed from a simple search engine into a digital ecosystem that changes the way humans interact with information, business and entertainment.

Behind its popularity, many are still curious about the origin of the name “Google”, how it was founded and who is now the owner after decades of existence.

To commemorate its 27th anniversary, here’s a summary of Google’s history, the meaning behind its name, and who owns it today, based on various sources gathered.

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History of Google

Google was founded in 1998 as a search engine company and has now become one of the largest and most comprehensive sites in the world. Through Google, people can find various information, both the most recent and those coming from old archives, with a simple connection to the Internet.

This company is under the auspices of Google LLC, a multinational company from the United States that focuses on Internet services and digital products. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both students at Stanford University.

Both are still listed as holding approximately 16% of the company’s shares. Google was officially founded as a private company on September 4, 1998. Since then its growth has been very rapid with several products, acquisitions and strategic collaborations.

Google’s popularity has increased dramatically since the early 2000s, especially when it became the flagship search engine over Yahoo! platform. After the Yahoo! closed in 2004, Google recorded up to 200 million searches per day.

In addition to the search engine, Google has also launched several other services such as email (Gmail), Office application packages, social networks, the Android operating system for mobile devices and Chrome OS for Chromebooks. Today, Google operates more than a million servers in global data centers, processes billions of searches, and handles tens of petabytes of user data every day.

Another major milestone occurred on August 10, 2015, when Google announced the formation of a holding company called Alphabet Inc.. Through this restructuring, Larry Page became Alphabet’s CEO, Sergey Brin as president, and Eric Schmidt assumed the presidency. Executive Chairman. Meanwhile, the position of CEO of Google is held by Sundar Pichai.

Read also: Google will bring Android to PC next year

Meaning of the name Google

The name Google was inspired by the word “googol”, a mathematical term for a very large number, i.e. the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. This name was chosen to describe the company’s vision of collecting and organizing infinite amounts of information so that anyone can access it around the world.

Who owns Google now?

Since the 2015 restructuring, Google has been under the control of Alphabet Inc., a holding company that also oversees other projects such as Waymo (autonomous cars), Verily (healthcare technology) and X Research (experimental projects).

Alphabet is a public company whose shares are listed on the stock exchange, so ownership is in the hands of investors, both institutions and individuals.

Even so, Larry Page and Sergey Brin still hold a lot of control through class B shares which provide higher voting rights than common shares. Although they are no longer directly involved in operations, both still play important roles on the company’s board of directors.

Currently, the CEO chair of Google and Alphabet is held by Sundar Pichai, who is focused on leading the company to the development of artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computingto hardware expansion.

Read also: Google introduces Gemini AI assistant on Google TV

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